


And Having Done All

by heixicanadragon



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, OC deaths, POV Character of Color, battle-nerd family members, city destruction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 20:56:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heixicanadragon/pseuds/heixicanadragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Iconic Survivor and the Last Man Standing, through the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Having Done All

**01/the forge**

 

Medcenter, Shatterdome, Tokyo, Japan  
May 16, 2016   
01:13  
  
It had been “an emergency situation.” The entire day had been “an emergency situation.” That was the phrase that the higher-ups and the non-local media kept repeating. FUBAR was the more honest and accurate assessment, and Herc had texted him that a couple hours earlier to Stacker’s unamused chuckle.   
  
 _A bloody fucking hell of a day_  was even more apt, his sister’s voice echoing from that time before K-Day. He has to agree. He stares into the mirror and watches the water drip down his face, flowing off his nose and running through the furrows around his mouth. K-Day had changed everything and changed nothing. Red tape was still red tape, even if it was just the threat of it from a city that lay smashed in dust. And trying to cut through it while being shuffled from one diagnostic to another debriefing finally to a hospital bed was even harder than usual.  
  
Stacker shakes the sound of Luna’s voice from his brain as he towels off his neck and wipes at his shoulders. He grimaces as the towel’s looped threads lift and pull at the bandages. He is too tired. It shouldn’t be this hard to lift a hand or control pressure and movement.  Living in his own body shouldn’t feel like he was controlling a multi-ton-heavy multi-story-tall jaeger, but there it is.  
  
Drifting with Tamsin today shouldn’t have felt like enduring a city riot in blackout, either, but there that was, too.    
  
That was after he and Tamsin had been flown in to stop the ugliest and most destructive wank-wad of kaiju he’d ever seen, which had already put this day in the running for the bloodiest fucking worst hell-pit shit-stain-of-satan day.   
  
Stacker had had a premonition that this day would end pretty badly, when the Tokyo command center had spotted movement around the Breach but had trouble keeping track of the walking seafood monster and then had finally lost it several nautical miles out from Tokyo. He and Tamsin had sat tight, next in the queue waiting to be deployed, as they listened to LOCCENT officers frantically scanning for visual contact or instrument readings so that the Jumphawks would have a target for the first jaeger drop-off. Tamsin had jabbed him with her elbow in the ribs, told him to lighten up, “We’re probably not even going to be needed today, Ronin’s got this,” and gone back to drumming her fingers against her armor. He’d listened to the clacking, his heart matching pace with her rhythm.  _This will end badly._  
  
It had ended badly. So fucking badly.  
  
Onibaba had somehow evaded LOCCENT’s tracking systems until it had already surfaced inside the 1 mile point from the furthest southwest city limits of the southwest peninsula. Tacit Ronin had instead been dropped in the middle of the bay’s mouth, a few nautical miles to the east and several south, and this miscalculation forced them to hustle to cut Onibaba off before the kaiju hit the most heavily populated areas while air support began air-to-ground strikes. The kaiju’s previous stealth suddenly had explained itself when it began ripping up roads and crushing concrete as it forced itself down into the city’s underground. Tacit Ronin’s crew’d yelled themselves hoarse in shock and anger as they scrambled after the mole tunnels ripping through the city, loping after it to keep visual contact. It’d taken independent visual confirmation from a few chopper crews before Joint Command finally understood what was going on and called back the attack aircraft.  
  
 _Hearing the command for air support recall, Stacker and Tamsin lock eyes, cold sweat dripping down Stacker’s neck under his drive suit._  
  
Coyote Tango had finally landed in a ravaged Tokyo, uprooted, flattened, tilled like soil under the plow. After a fruitless chase of trailing kaiju burrows in circles through the city, Ronin’s team was down, crippled by claws crunching through thigh joint drive shafts, in the docks of the shipyards.   
  
Stacker shudders to remember the crab burrowing its way into half-evacuated buildings, emerging on the other side covered with bodies, some struggling and some limp, leaving a trail of papers, dust and glass shards flung in the air as the buildings fell in its wake. It had skittered down sidestreets and cut underneath bridges, leading Tacit Ronin through a rout of a terrified city back to the docks before demobilizing them and heading north again.  
  
They had landed almost on top of it, LOCCENT not taking any chances on giving Onibaba room to disappear, even if it put the kaiju too close in range for Coyote Tango’s mortar canons. It was imperative to head Onibaba off before it hit the clusters of newly dug-out underground shelters near the subway’s central hub.   
  
Stacker and Tamsin had fallen into their old rhythm, hard won over two years’ worth of missions, when without warning Tamsin had collapsed early in the fight, hanging in her harness like a dead puppet. He’d shouted past the gravel in his throat for LOCCENT to shut off the Pons connection, break the drift so that he’d stay afloat, stay out of the dark whirlpool of her unconsciousness that was already sucking him into a whirl of black-red-gray, and promptly began screaming.  
  
Stacker’s brain had burned, had flooded, had been crushed under the load of more signal per neuron strand than a brain should ever carry, should ever be able to control or direct, or so the neuro-team all had said. He still aches from scorches all over, and on his left side, the deeper burns from the metal plating and neural connectors are rivers of fire on his skin. His bones feel like charred lead.  
  
He rode the pain and adrenaline for the next full 3 hours. He couldn’t remember much except for the utter silence in the conn-pod punctuated by his groans of pain and the crunching of jaeger armor against kaiju skin and the fire that was consuming him.   
  
He had ripped off the drive-suit helmet as soon as the kaiju was down for good. He couldn’t see. Tamsin had still been unconscious, but she had been breathing steadily and once he’d recovered enough brain power to report the kill and their current coordinates and condition to LOCCENT and their Jumphawk squadron leader, he unhooked himself from the harness and gingerly climbed up and out. Stacker Pentecost needed air. Needed sunlight. Needed to get out of the conn-pod. Needed to see.  
  
He’d seen—  
  
 _He sees a small speck of blue, moving among the rubble. He squints, shaking and bleary-eyed, as reality slowly solidifies around him and the fire in his brain quiets to embers._  
  
 _He smiles when he realizes that it is a child, a happy, shellshocked child, limping through the destruction of a city. His heart drops in his gut when he realizes the child is alone._  
  
He had stood there, staring at the child, helpless at the top of a powered-down 82 meter tall metal robotic suit with an unconscious co-pilot, while the little one crept forward toward the feet of the jaeger, favoring a foot and clutching something bright red.   
  
He’d been unable to keep his eyes off the bright red and blue shuffling figure. Stacker’d felt light, like he’d float away, like he had been scrubbed clean and raw. He’d been standing, shaking with the effort to continue standing, and a gust of wind’d sent him swaying as choppers began circling from above. It’d been folly to continue standing when he’d been about to fall off his own jaeger from fatigue, so he’d sat down, heavily, still watching what he could now clearly distinguish was a young girl wearing a bright blue peacoat and holding one of her shoes in her hand as she stopped in the shadow of Coyote Tango. She’d looked up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun that Stacker had at that moment realized was warming his back.  
  
They’d looked at each other. She was young. She was so young. Stacker had seen tear tracks marking her cheeks before she had entered the shadow of the jaeger but now with her face in the shade she’d seemed challenging, calculating, as she’d looked the jaeger up and down, then sat on the toe of its foot.  
  
A chopper had already landed a couple hundred meters away with first-response med workers running to the young girl when a few pairs of hands had hauled Stacker up to his feet and guided him to the hovering chopper a few feet behind him, where he’d seen Tamsin on a stretcher inside already.  
  
Then the flurry away to the Shatterdome, the pawing of hands all over him, the bandaging of wounds, the forcing down of water and what food he could swallow past the raw mess of his throat, the meetings, the recorded debriefings, the studied avoidance of the screens carrying news blips and sound bites and video clips of the fight, more meetings, diagnostic after diagnostic after blood sample after CAT scan after tongue depressor after bright light in the eyes, cameras continuously snapping, recording, memorizing—  
  
It hadn’t been until after 23:00 that Stacker had remembered the little girl again. He had been slouching next to Tamsin’s bed, wordlessly somber with waiting, as she picked at some ice-cream in a paper cup, when he’d startled into straight-backed posture, remembering the limping child. And a little too late recalling the severity of the burns on his side.  
  
He’d found himself running down hallways in the medcenter until he found her in the EMT rec room.   
  
 _He finds her. She’d been taken in a chopper from the battlefield and, according to the EMTs, had stuck to one or the other of the EMTs’ side since, depending on their shift availability. The team had been fighting off reporters from the room for several hours, while mostly unsuccessfully plying the girl with food and bath and change of clothes. An earnest young sprout of a chopper pilot is ranting something about how cruel and ruthless some people must be to try to dig up a ‘symbol of hope and determination’ with no regard to cost or integrity—_  
  
 _—but the sounds wash over Stacker’s brain into nothingness as the young girl, “Mori Mako,” at first tentatively, then effortlessly, beams that same breathlessly joyous smile from before._  
  
 _The room stills._  
  
 _Stacker Pentecost, a quiet and serious man, rarely feels at a loss for words, but his grasp of the Japanese language suddenly seems as tenuous and clumsy as it did three years ago when he’d first started studying in earnest._  
  
 _He introduces himself. Asks her if she was injured or needed anything. Apologizes that he hadn’t come to check on her before now. He’d had many other things to attend to but that doesn’t excuse his neglectful behavior._  
  
 _He accidentally slips into casual address while asking if she knows where her family is when she starts crying inconsolably._  
  
Everyone had gathered around her, the closest EMT team petting her hair and wrapping a fleece blanket around her, the ones who spoke Japanese crooning over her, Stacker standing numbly where he was. He’d fucked that up. He’d been turning to leave when little Mako had, in between hiccups, sobbed loudly that she only had her  _sensei_  now.  
  
He’d felt like someone had just dumped cold water down his back. He’d stood there, staring at this little girl who had just claimed him, and she’d stared back with the stare of one who is utterly confident, hiccuping and snot rolling down and sticking her chin-length hair to her face not withstanding.  
  
 _The EMTs who had comprehended the exchange look from Mako to Stacker and then give shrugs or wan smiles urging him to just humor her. Others ask her who is her_ sensei _? And where might they find this person so that they can get more help for her? Mako looks steadily at_ him _._  
  
 _Stacker Pentecost is thirty years old. Single. No living family. A jaeger pilot. Whose copilot is awaiting diagnosis of an unexpected black-out during combat. Kaiju come to ruin and kill, more each year, larger and more dangerous each time._  
  
 _He looks steadily back. Then turns and leaves._  
  
He looks again into the mirror. Sees in the reflection the face of a man that has seen too much, done too much, endured too much, and has farther yet to go. He sees in the mirror the bloodshot eyes that his father wore. He sees the lined exhaustion of his mother’s cheeks in his own. He sees Luna’s half-grimace, half-smirk, twitching his lips. He sees the expression that Tamsin wore today when the doctors kept on giving her noncommittal answers to her questions.   
  
He closes his eyes, pictures the child limping to the jaeger past the monstrous carcass, holding a red shoe in hand.  
  
He sees her look up at him expectantly, measure the jaeger that he is resting upon, and then determinedly flop down on the jaeger’s toe.  
  
He gingerly lies down in the hospital cot and sleeps. In the morning, Stacker Pentecost downloads some new forms of paperwork and opens lines of inquiry with the Tokyo local authorities.  
  
That very day, Mako announces to the EMT team that she will be taking her leave of them to go with Sensei.


End file.
